Lit: A Memoir, by Mary Karr. HarperCollins.
Culture Watch
Margaret Regan 7-01-2010
In March 2008, several fast-food employees found themselves on the wrong side of U.S. immigration policies.
Becky Garrison 7-01-2010
Made for Goodness: And Why This Makes all the Difference, by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu. Harper One.
Rose Marie Berger 7-01-2010
The Complete Psalms, by Pamela Greenberg. Bloomsbury USA. Joyful Noise, edited by Robert Strong. Autumn House Press.
Gareth Higgins 7-01-2010
Documentary films have the potential to both show us the world and change it.
Elizabeth Palmberg 7-01-2010
- How did you begin your work as a lawyer and activist? I think it was my vocation. In my own life, my parents said sometimes, “Women can’t do that, and men can.” I answered all the time, “Why do you think that women can’t do that?” When I got the opportunity to begin work as a lawyer, I was focusing on women’s law. In Congo, the culture said women couldn’t inherit land. We have a great law—but the implementation, that is the problem. I began assisting women pro bono in the east, in Goma.
Gareth Higgins 6-01-2010
The multiplex stabbing is the consequence of a dehumanized culture that defaults to sarcasm and nurtures angry condemnation.
Kimberly B. George, Letha Dawson Scanzoni 6-01-2010
Cross-generational blogging about faith and feminism.
Liane Rozzell 6-01-2010
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. The New Press.
Kathleen and James McGinnis 5-01-2010
Children's literature provides one of the most uplifting, energizing, and soul-freeing pursuits for any child—or any adult who cares about children. For those of us who live and breathe social justice or who grab at the edges of social justice whenever we can, children's literature can be visionary, comforting, and challenging as we think about our own role in the peace and justice universe.
The following books—for preschoolers to grade 3—are examples of the kind of children's literature that is rooted in gospel values and has a role in creating a more just world. The books reflect themes of respect for self and others, nonviolent communication, dealing with anger and forgiveness, respect for the environment, the importance of play and creativity, our global interdependence, and courage in the face of war and injustice. These values are shown in both practical and magical ways.
Katherine Paterson 5-01-2010
The summer that I was 17 years old, I, who was born of missionary parents in China, was rooming with a friend whose parents were missionaries in Africa. Although our mothers had been friends long before we were born, Mary and I first met as summer employees at our denomination’s conference center when she came back to the States to go to college. World War II had driven my parents out of China, so I had lived, since the age of 8, in various places in the southern United States.
One night after the day of waitressing was over, Mary began to read aloud to me Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country. At first it was just the sound of Mary’s Africa-haunted voice caressing the beauty of Paton’s language that kept me wide awake and enthralled. But gradually, chapter by chapter, that beauty told me of the unspeakable oppression and tragedy that was South Africa’s story for too many years. I’m not sure exactly when it happened, but suddenly one night the book came alive for me in a new way. I saw for the first time that the tragedy of South Africa was the tragedy of the American South, where I had been blind to the oppression from which I as a white person had been exempt. I began to cry, sob rather, for my own thoughtless sins and the sins of my people.
I look back on those tears as a turning point in my young life. I did not leave all my sins and fears on that wet pillow—I’m still not free from them—but I know my life began to change that night because of a book.
Caroline Gordon, in her book How to Read a Novel, speaks of the reading of a great book as a “conversion experience.” You are not the same person when you finish the last page, she says, that you were when you first sat down to read. I believe, from my own experience, that Gordon is right, and that is why I think reading is so important to our growth as wise and compassionate human beings.